Synopsis: Maureen Dowd tries to save her kingdom by keeping her son the prince (the Male Threat, who she’s apparently raised to be a blithering solipsist) from finding and marrying the one creature in all existence who can get a rat to scrub a toilet. Conflict ensues, and after much posturing, Maureen Dowd is destroyed by a heroic chipmunk, at which point the Chick trades up from Prince who will satisfy her needs to Lawyer who will satisfy her needs while enabling her to discover a brand new world of Shopping, and abandons a universe of Platonic Realism in which she can theoretically life forever in happiness, to remain in a mortal world yet satisfying world of Boutique Retail.

Oh, yes, and there’s a dragon in there somewhere. But she seems to mostly resemble Maureen Dowd, and is about as threatening, so who cares?

Pelosi was briefed on waterboarding in ’02, per the WaPo (here via Politico).

This more or less settles the balance-of-power act in Congress — she’s his any time he wants to steer the red meat brigade after her. The balance of power issue is resolved — and Pelosi is absolutely the loser. She’ll be doing his bidding or else so long as there’s a Democratic base to play ball with.

One thing is clear: Beijing suspects that the US Federal Reserve is engineering a covert default on America’s debt by printing money. Premier Wen Jiabao issued a blunt warning last month that China was tiring of US bonds. “We have lent a huge amount of money to the US, so of course we are concerned about the safety of our assets,” he said.

The US has played a game of “screw its holders” for a while now, able to get away with flatly ridiculous monetary policy because of the petrodollar regime. China’s move is actually good for all concerned — short-term this has the potential to hurt the US lots, but longterm, it will force some kind of fiscal sanity, in a system htat has pretty much openly defaulted on honest dealing.

It’s not us moving to a Gold Standard — but perhaps this is actually better.